Artist of the Week: Willy Moon

It was just over a year ago when New Zealand–born songwriter Willy Moon burst onto the Internet with the deliriously catchy “I Wanna Be Your Man”—a bedroom-produced toe-tapper that blends retro rock-’n’-roll with a meaty electro-crunch hook, the kind of weird culture mash-up that has now become Moon’s trademark. In its equally arresting video (which was directed by girlfriend and photographer Sasha Rainbow) Moon can be seen gyrating in a sharp all-white three-piece suit, part Buddy Holly, part 1970s Steve Martin. Meanwhile, “Railroad Track,” his newest single, and his first since signing with Jack White’s Nashville-based Third Man Records, is a soulful mix of hip-hop-like gospel sampling and the sort of badass blues-rock breakdown you’d hear as the credits roll on a particularly dramatic episode of Breaking Bad.

“I’ve always loved bands like The Cramps, who were doing rock’-n’-roll but putting a different spin on it,” says the 23-year-old Moon (real name William Sinclair) from the home in North East London that he shares with Rainbow. “I don’t get those kinds of people that jump on a bandwagon. When I made ‘I Wanna Be Your Man,’ it was the first track I felt really proud of and could stand behind as something my own.”

Moon originally moved to London at seventeen. He won’t say more than that he was looking to escape the small towns of his childhood and experience “life in the big city,” but by the age of 20, he was stuck in a string of dead-end jobs that ranged from working in a pub at a desolate end of High Street Kensington, to manning the womenswear floor at Selfridges.

“I react badly to authority and people telling me what to do,” he says. “After a while, I started doing weird things like pretending to be a mannequin and jumping out at people.”

Uninspired (but thankfully not the subject of any sort of lawsuit), he decided to take the artist’s way out and relocate to Berlin for a couple of months, although, Moon says, he wasn’t interested in “the Berlin thing,” as he calls it. “For me it was like a holiday from what I was doing in London. I didn’t really go out to nightclubs; I just read a lot of books.”

He didn’t do much songwriting either (“It was much more primitive there,” he says. “I had no means of recording anything”), but maybe that was for the best. Especially since he now sees his time in the German capital as a sort of creative palate cleanser; when he was forced back to London, he found a new focus and the oddly enticing sound-and-stage persona he occupies today.

“I got a letter from German immigration saying ‘your visa expires in three days, get out of the country,’ ” he says. “I was so pissed off until I actually got back to London. When I did, all of a sudden, everything felt fresh.”

Listening to Moon’s glitchy drum loops, it’s easy to assume [that] a lot of “I Wanna Be Your Man” must be informed by Berlin’s stark industrial electro tradition, but he sees no correlation. Similarly he doesn’t think London, home of the teddy boy, and a haven for rockabilly revivalists for decades, is the root of the fifties croonery that also rounds off his style.

“I’ve just never really gotten into revivalism,” Moon says. “I hate purism and that things have to be done in such-and-such a way. There is nothing worse than playing a concert and seeing a bunch of old men with quiffs in the audience.”WATCH: “Railroad Track” by Willy Moon.